False Memory: pp 92-149 (with intervals)

When we last left Dusty, he had picked up some things from Skeet's apartment to bring to his brother in rehab. In the apartment, he was surprised to see a sheaf of papers with the name "Dr. Yen Lo" written on it, over and over, 39 times, with growing distress, until the pen broke.  Now we are getting into some serious clues.

Dusty takes Valet the dog and a couple of suitcases to Skeet in rehab.  Because Skeet is on suicide watch, Dusty has to follow him, even into the bathroom.  As Skeet is washing his hands, Dusty asks who Dr. Yen Lo is. Skeet says, "I'm listening," and goes catatonic.  He ignores the water on his hands getting hotter and hotter.  When Dusty turns off the hot water and replaces it with cold, Skeet ignores that, too.  Dusty leads Skeet back into his room, where he appears to be in a semi-catatonic trance.

Skeet again says, "I'm listening," and a very odd exchange follows:

"Listening to what?"

"Listening to what?"

"What're you doing?"

"What am I doing?" Skeet asked.

"I asked what you were listening to."

"You."

"Yeah, okay, so tell me who's Dr. Yen Lo."

"You."

"Me?  I'm your brother.  Remember?"

"Is that what you want me to say?"

Frowning, Dusty said, "Well, it's the truth, isn't it?"

Although his face remained slack and expressionless, Skeet said, "Is it the truth?  I'm confused."

"What club do you want me to join?" Skeet asked with apparent seriousness.

The exchange continues in much the same manner until Dusty asks if this is some sort of Abbot and Costello routing, and Skeet says, "Is it?"  But when Dusty tells Skeet to look around, Skeet looks around.  When Dusty says, "I'm sure you know where you are," Skeet does, indeed, know.  When Dusty, assuming Skeet's odd behavior is the result of taking more drugs, asks Skeet if he sneaked any more drugs, Skeet answers, "Is that what you want me to me to say?"  When Dusty tells Skeet just to tell the truth, Skeet says no.  Dusty then asks what is wrong with him and Skeet says, "What do you want to be wrong with me?"

Skeet is having weird eye movement, similar to REM during a dream, except that his eyes are open.  He complains that Dusty is not following the rules.  Naturally, Dusty asks what the rules are.  "You know the rules," says Skeet.  "Pretend I don't," says Dusty.  Skeet identifies three rules.  The first rule is, "Clear cascades."  The second is, "Into the waves scatter."  The third is, "Blue pine needles."  Dusty demands an explanation.  Skeet says he is the waves, Dusty is the clear cascades, and the pine needles are missions.  He also says that Dusty is Dr. Yen Lo, and that Dr. Yen Lo and the clear cascades are one and the same.

Valet the dog is quite disturbed by this conversation. He growls, raises his hackles, and goes out into the corridor, looking for an intruder.

The incomprehensible exchanges, much like the one above, then continue, until Dusty, frustrated, tells Skeet to give him a break and go to sleep.  Skeet obediently falls asleep, to Dusty's great alarm. His alarm grows when he is unable to wake Skeet.  Nurses and the doctor come in any try unsuccessfully to wake Skeet.  When they are unable, they start examining him for various conditions that could have made him fall into a coma.  All are negative.  The drugs he took that morning have largely been metabolized.  There is nothing medically wrong with him, nothing to indicate that he is anything but asleep, except that he can't be awoken.

But then, after causing great consternation, he finally yawns, stretches, and awakens, with no memory of the odd exchange.  Dusty doesn't dare ask about Dr. Yen Lo again, but he does ask about the "rules."  They sound vaguely familiar to Skeet, and he immediately recognizes, "Clear cascades/Into the waves scatter/Blue pin needles" as a haiku that seems vaguely familiar.

Okay, this is our second introduction to haiku.  The first time was the never-explained "Pine wind blowing hard" haiku that Martie could not quite remember whether she heard in Dr. Ahriman's office or read in the novel while waiting.  It is also the first clear introduction of a parallel between the two stories, although the implied theme of memory lapses and mind control is also present in both cases.  It is also another opportunity for a strange semi-catatonic reaction like Susan's.  If Dusty presses Skeet as to where he learned the haiku, this would be another example of Getting Too Close, and an opportunity for Skeet to react like Susan -- going catatonic as the questions become more and more dangerous, and then abruptly snapping out and remembering nothing.  But apparently Koontz decides that he has put Dusty and Skeet through enough for one night, because Dusty decides Skeet has had enough for the night and declines to press.

Then Dusty starts getting a strange, paranoid feeling that the clinic is not safe.  Somehow everyone seems just a little too perfect to be real.  This would seem to suggest that at the time, Koontz was thinking of making the entire clinic be staffed with brainwashed pod people under Ahriman's control.  This is later determined not to be the case, so I can only assume that Koontz changed his mind.  (Ahriman does turn out to be connected with the clinic, though, so Dusty's suspicions are at least partly justified).  After leaving Skeet, Dusty goes sleuthing around.  Standing on the ground outside, he thinks he sees a male figure, too tall and wide-shouldered to be any of the clinic personnel, standing over Skeet's bed.

This is more or less the last of the dangling clues.  Nothing comes of the mysterious figure Dusty thinks (but is not sure) he sees standing over Skeet.  It is possible that Dr. Ahriman pays Skeet a visit in the clinic that night, but nothing else in the novel says so, and it is distinctly implied elsewhere that he does not.  So why bother with that mysterious figure at all?  Like so many clues up till now, this one is raised, goes nowhere, and is then dropped.

Fortunately, this is about the end of the misleading clues, and everything becomes increasingly relevant.

Dusty head home, where, unbeknownst to him, his wife is totally freaking out.

What I Fear

Right now we are headed for a fiscal cliff. Taxes are set to rise at the end of the year and major budget cuts are mandated.  Worse yet, the debt ceiling will run out, and there is no end to the mischief Republicans can make if Obama is re-elected.  In effect, they lose all incentive to prevent disaster, because if they drive the economy off the cliff, Obama will be blamed and they will benefit.  Now at least two commentators are urging surrender.  Don't worry, they say.  Out of power they may (essentially) advocate rolling back the New Deal, but in power they will recognize how unpopular that is and quickly discover that deficits only matter when a Democrat is in the White House.  Republican deficits don't count.  But they are willing to drive the economy off a cliff if a Democrat holds the White House.  So let's give them the presidency, or they will kill the hostage.

I have long believed that Republicans want a de facto one party state a whole lot more than they want to repeal the New Deal.  Doubtless their preference would be for both, but if it becomes apparent that any serious attempt to end the New Deal will lead to their losing elections, I have no doubt the Republicans will be willing to kick the can down the road.  Right now, going with the Ryan Plan, Republicans seem to be hoping to cut spending on the poor as much as they can get away with, while cutting taxes enough that sooner or later (they hope) the bond vigilantes will attack and force massive cuts in everything but armies, police and prisons.  But it may be true that once in power, this will start to look a lot less important than just holding power.

But even if they don't undo the New Deal, giving the Republicans a monopoly on power because they will drive the economy off the cliff is a Democrat is ever elected again is incompatible with any normal definition of democracy.  In the days of the PRI, Mexico was democratic on paper, but not on the ground.  Something similar may be said of Japan under the Liberal Democratic Party.  So far as I understand it, both parties kept in power largely by controlling patronage and buying the votes of the majority.  This led to an extraordinary level of corruption in both countries.  But still, I am inclined to prefer a one-party state maintained by bribing a majority of the population to vote for them to a one-party state maintained by the threat to completely wreck the economy and government if the opposing party is elected.  In the end, both the PRI and the LDP were defeated, and both grumbled, but duly stepped down.  Democracy ultimately prevailed.  If Republicans are intending what they seem to be intending, that will mean they intend to take things further than the one-party states in Mexico and Japan, and refuse to accept the results of a democratic election.  This goes beyond mere corruption into disloyalty*.

So, if Obama wins in November, Republicans will drive the economy off the cliff for partisan advantage.  If Romney wins in November, Republicans will have ultimate blackmail tool, the threat to drive the economy off a cliff if any Democrat is ever again elected President.  If the Republicans lose and drive the economy off the cliff, they get their monopoly on power by reminding people of the horror that occurred last time a Democrat was in office.  If the Republicans win, the economy will (presumably) recover, and they get their monopoly on power by constantly maintaining the implied threat.  (Actually saying, vote for us or we will drive the economy off the cliff is, of course, to obvious an act of black mail  to be done openly).  Both choices are unpalatable.

In the end, though, I cannot agree with the people who counsel surrender just this once, because we can always come back and fight when the economy is stronger.  Default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling will always be disastrous.  The only alternative I can think of is to somehow bring Republican blackmail out into the open so that they cannot escape blame for their actions.  Democratic strategists had damn well better be figuring out how.

__________________________________
*Disloyalty in the sense of putting loyalty to party ahead of loyalty to the public good.  In opposition, this means being a disloyal opposition.  In power, it means disloyalty to basic democratic norms.

False Memory, pp. 91-150 (with intervals)

At this point, chapters become less useful as designations.  In fact, I ended my last post on Martie just before the end of Chapter 9 because the subject markedly changed at the end of the chapter.  Martie had just left her friend's house and was heading home.  As she puts her key in the ignition and turns it, she has a vision of herself  driving the key into Dusty's eye and turning it. She is violently sick, then gets back in the car and drives home.  Caught in a traffic jam on the way home, she calls her doctor, Closterman, and says she has an emergency but can't discuss what it is about.  She gets an appointment at 8:30 the next morning.  (When is the last time you got a doctor's appointment that fast?)

Arriving home, she finds the mirror broken and assumes Dusty did it by accident.  Apparently, she has no memory of breaking it.  This is the third mention of that damn mirror.  What gives?  It plays no further role in the story whatever.  I can only assume its purpose is to show that she has memory lapses.  But couldn't Koontz show that in some way that is better integrated into the story line?

Anyhow, she has a deep, irrational fear that she will do something terribly violent and sets out to Martie-proof the house by throwing away anything dangerous.  She throws out knives, forks, scissors, wine bottles, rolling pins, matches, cleaning chemicals, a mortar and pestle (Koontz, by the way, confuses which is the mortar and which is the pestle).

pestle

mortar

All this goes on for a total of about 16 pages.  Koontz, by the way, shows an extraordinary talent here for creating an atmosphere showing the morbid thoughts going through Martie's head as evening falls:

Already, fat night crawlers squirmed out of the lawn, onto the walkway,  Snails had come forth, too, oozing silvery trails behind them. 

A fecund odor arose from the wet grass, from the mulch and the rotting leaves in the flower beds, from the darkly glistening shrubbery, and from the dripping trees.

In the gloaming, Martie was uneasily aware of the fertile life to which the sun was forbidding but to which the night offered hospitality.  She was aware, too, that an awful centipedal part of herself shared an enthusiasm for the night with all the wriggling-creeping-crawling-slithering life that came out of hiding between dusk and dawn. . . . Outside, the shrill singing of toads in the wet twilight.

In the midst of Martie's panic attack, Susan calls to reveal the terrible secret she couldn't tell before.  Her estranged husband, Eric, isn't just sneaking in at night while she is asleep.  He is drugging and raping her.  She goes to sleep in a T-shirt and panties and wakes up sore and bruised, dirty and degraded, with his semen in her underwear.  She has changed locks several times, each time with a new locksmith.*  But no matter how often she changes locks, he keeps getting in.  She wedges a chair against the door and puts powder on the window sills to catch him if he comes in by one of the windows.  But it does no good, somehow he keeps getting in, leaving the door locked and the chair wedged when he leaves.  Convinced she is being drugged because she never wakes while being raped, she has changed where she orders her food (she gets it from groceries that deliver because she can't go out).  But it keeps happening.  And she can't flee because of her agoraphobia.  She could almost believe her phantom rapist is a demon and not a flesh-and-blood man.

Martie is herself in the grips of a panic attack when she answers the call and desperately wants to get off the phone to resume emptying the house of weapons.  She asks if Eric denies this.  Susan admits that she has not confronted him because it is "forbidden."  Naturally, Martie asks who has forbidden it.  This is a perfect opportunity to return to what we saw before when someone starts Getting Too Close -- for Susan to go catatonic and be unable to answer further.  It has the distinct disadvantage in this case that the conversation is happening by phone, so Martie can't see Susan go catatonic the way she did before (this was before Skype), so it is understandable that Koontz decides not to use it.  Instead, when Martie presses Susan on who has forbidden her to confront Eric, Susan just changes the subject and the conversation continues.  Desperate to get away, Martie ends the conversation, promising to call back.

Her panic continues.  The house has a gas fireplace with fake logs.  Now she begins to fear she is having memory lapses and may have turned on the gas during a blackout.  She has, so far as she knows, no reason to suspect that she has memory lapses, but she does vaguely remember that odd sequence at the doctor's office where she can't quite tell whether she was looking out Dr. Ahriman's window, or it was a scene in the novel she was reading.  (The broken mirror, on the other hand, does not come up).

Finally, she sets to work on the tools in the garage.  First, she smashes them with a sledge hammer.  Then she realizes she is being violent and enjoying it way too much.  So she cuts off the heads of the tools with a power saw.  Then she realizes how deadly the power saw is, so she smashes it with a crow bar.  And then, of course, she realizes the crow bar is as deadly as any other tool, and a lot harder to disable.  It is at this point that Dusty pulls up in his car.

I will stop here, even though it is not the end of a chapter, because it is at this point that the Dusty and Martie stories come together.  Next post will be about what Dusty has been doing while all this was going on, because he is starting to unearth some real clues.

*This puts a small crimp in the story.  It has already been made clear that Martie has a key to the apartment.  If Susan changed the lock, she would have to give Martie a new key, and Martie would naturally wonder why.  But we can pass over that). 

Just a Quick Note

I refuse to post at length on President Obama's endorsement of gay marriage.  Our economy has gone through its worst crisis since the Great Depression and is making an excruciatingly slow recovery, assuming it doesn't fall off the "fiscal cliff."  All the Bush era abuses except for torture are still in place and stronger than ever.  Republicans see a real opportunity to repeal the New Deal and turn the clock back to the Gilded Age.  The general militarization of law enforcement proceeds apace.  And I'm supposed to be all excited over the prospect of gay marriage?!?!?!  Sorry, but no.  I have other priorities.

False Memory: Chapters 12-18, ppl 66-85 (with intervals)

When we last left Dusty, he had taken his drug addicted half-brother Skeet to rehab following a suicide attempt. I did not dwell at length on Dusty's adventures up to this point because they contain very few clues of things to come and nothing to suggest anything below the surface. 

That changes about page 66 when Dusty returns home to change into dry clothes.  Valet the dog is happy to see him, but seems strangely disturbed about something and wants Dusty to look at the downstairs bathroom.  When he does, he finds that someone used the waste basket to break the mirror.  So now we know, back on page 15 when Martie didn't like what she saw in the mirror, but she knew what to do about it, that what she did was break it.  We later learn that she has no memory of breaking it.  What we never learn is why Ahriman would tell her to break the mirror and then not remember that she did it.  Dusty at first suspects burglars, but there is no sign of a break-in, no other damage, and nothing stolen.  So he concludes that it must have been some sort of accident by Martie.  He cleans up the broken glass.

Dusty changes clothes and decides to take Valet with him to the clinic.  The phone rings, and he answers.  When he hangs up, he says that someone was trying to sell him a subscription to the L.A. Times.  Valet is napping "as if Dusty had been on  the phone ten minutes rather than thirty seconds."  Dusty gets the dog into the car and going, grumbling all the time about his dislike of newspapers, except in toilet training dogs, and sales people.  It occurs to him that despite having a perfect photographic memory (this was mentioned earlier), he does not remember whether it was a man or woman selling the paper, or what he said. 

Okay, so once again, Koontz has done a good job of suggesting something creepy happening over the phone, but disguising it well enough that the audience could easily miss it.  In fact, the only reason to notice it this time around is that something similar happened to Martie about 50 pages ago.  But once again, while Koontz does a good job of disguising his clue, he utterly neglects to explain it later on.  This time there is quite a plausible explanation.  Most likely Ahriman is calling to ask how the suicide went and finding out that it failed.  This may be so.  But if it is, we are never told.

Dusty then goes on to Skeet's apartment.  The perishable food in the fridge is minimal (a loaf of bread, a pack of bologna, and a carton of milk) and well past its expiration date.  But the apartment is impeccably neat, to Dusty's surprise.  Dusty is right to be surprised.  I don't know how much Dean Koontz knows about real life addicts and losers, but I have more experience with them than I care to admit, and it has been my experience that people whose lives are a shambles do, indeed, usually have apartments that are also a shambles.  (For that matter, in my own life, I can chart when my morale is down by when I start letting my housekeeping go).

Skeet's neatness is decidedly odd, but it is essential to the story line because it allows Dusty to spot the one thing in his apartment that is not neat -- a messy scattering of loose pages from a notepad.  Written over and over on the pages is the name, "Dr. Yen Lo."  At first the writing is neat, but the handwriting deteriorates over time, written unsteadily and with great emotion, the pen bearing down so hard it starts to tear the paper.  Finally, after 39 iterations, Skeet presses the pen so hard that it breaks.  Dusty looks through the phone book under physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists, but does not find any Dr. Yen Lo. 

This turns out to be perhaps the most important clue yet, one that leads straight into the real story of what is going one, one that is definitely not left hanging.  But it is also the worst anomaly of the whole novel.  The other dangling clues that go nowhere don't quite fit the premise of the book but can be explained with some imagination.  This one (as we shall see) goes directly against it.

Reflections on European Elections

What alarms me most about the recent European elections is not that the radical left got 17% of the vote in Greece.  It is not that the radical right got nearly 18% of the vote in France.  It's not that the Netherlands coalition has fallen apart as far-right leader Geert Wilders refuses to continue in the present self-destructive course of austerity.  And it certainly isn't that France just elected a respectable, mainstream leader who thinks that Europe's current course of self-destructive austerity might not be a good idea.

It's that people are reacting to the election of a respectable, mainstream leader who questions Europe's current self-destructive course as if it were the election of a wild-eyed extremist.  Now that's dangerous.

It makes me think of Scott Sumner.  Scott Sumner is a blogging economist and a disciple of Milton Friedman who still likes to cherish the illusion that that makes him a conservative.  These days, being a disciple of Friedman on macro issues makes you a wild-eyed left winger.  He urges conservatives to agree to a more expansionary monetary policy, even if it means a little more inflation, lest the alternative be the "horrible, statist policies" of a Roosevelt or a Kirchner.  As if a Roosevelt or a Kirchner were the worst conservatives had to fear.  I will grant that there is much to criticize in both men.  Both had some authoritarian tendencies and left much to be desired on the civil liberties front.  But both were ultimately democratic politicians.  Anyone who did not like their policies was free to contest them through the democratic process.  The reason that such efforts failed was not that either crushed his opponents by brute force, but that both were extremely popular because the economy flourished under their leadership.

The trouble in Europe right now is that the VSP's (that's Krugman's name for Very Serious People) treat any deviation from the current suicidal course as completely outside all reasonable discussion.  The VSP's will quickly make clear to Francois Hollande that he has two choices -- embrace the current madness, or forfeit all claim to respectability.

So what happens when all respectable players embrace a highly self-destructive course of action, and identify such self-destructiveness as the very defining feature of respectability?  Well, challenges to self-destruction don't go away.  They merely migrate to the fringes.  And the fringes get bigger and bigger.  Proposals to do what has to be done, like reject German demands for austerity and even consider withdrawal from the Euro, start to be coupled with very disturbing xenophobia in-group loyalty. 

Does Sumner fear that the current inflation aversion will lead to a Roosevelt or a Kirchner?  Let him consider some of the worse people depressions have brought to power.  Let him consider Marine LePen winning on an anti-immigrant platform.  Or the radical left attempting to form a coalition in Greece.  Or some very disturbing developments in Hungary.  To say nothing of You Know Who.

False Memory: Chapters 11-17, pp. 64-90 (with intervals)

All right, this section has the last of the major hanging clues, although there are still a few lesser ones scattered about.  It also starts the serious progression of Martie's phobia and understanding what it is.

Martie and Susan leave the doctor's office and head home.  Martie almost forgets her book, and hesitates in picking it up when Susan reminds her.  Martie stops for Chinese takeout and Tsingtao beer.  When they get back home, Martie insists on eating with chopsticks because the fork makes her nervous.  She has uncomfortable thoughts about a fork gouging someone's eye or tearing out someone's arteries.  The bottle opener has a sharp point and makes her so uneasy she lets Susan open the beer.  Mirrors continue to make her nervous.  Again she wonders about that grapefruit juice that never gets explained. 

And then we get a significant, real clue.  When Martie watches Susan eating with a fork, she is not alarmed.  The fork seems harmless when Susan holds it.  It is only the fork in her hand that Martie fears.  Which suggests that what she fears is not the fork, but what she might do with it.

And then comes the hanging clue. Up till now Susan has defended her estranged husband, Eric, even though he could not cope with her agoraphobia and left her.  Now she changes her  mind and calls him a "selfish pig."  (That actually turns out to be significant in another way as well).  She says she has changed her mind because her agoraphobia may like in problems with her marriage.  In fact, she suspects now that Eric is having an affair, something she had never so much as hinted at before.

Susan says, "Sometimes a discovery like that, all of a sudden, it makes you feel so vulnerable. . . . And that's what agoraphobia is -- an overwhelming, crippling feeling of vulnerability."  But she says the words without emotion, as if quoting a psychology textbook.  Martie asks why she never hinted at this before.  Susan says maybe she was too ashamed.  Martie asks her why she should be ashamed when her husband is the one who has wronged her.  Susan is puzzled, doesn't know, doesn't appear to have even thought about it before.

We can see what is going on here.  Susan is not expressing her own beliefs or feelings, but simply reciting canned phrases Dr. Ahriman fed her, sort of like Martie's repeated phrases about the book, "The writing was good.  The plot was entertaining.  The characters were colorful.  She enjoyed it."  As long as she is simply reciting canned phrases, Susan never questions what she is told.  But when she is challenged, she has neither experience nor reasoning to back it up.  This by itself would work, but then Dean Koontz goes further.

Susan searches for ways to blame herself, but Martie challenges her.  She asks what Eric has to say for himself.  Susan gives a vague answer, saying they haven't discussed it in detail.  Martie demands to know who the other woman is.  Susan doesn't know.  Martie is shocked, "Didn't Eric tell you?"  Susan goes blank and says, "Eric?" Susan whispers, her face "as inanimate as the face of a doll" that she didn't learn this from Eric.  Martie demands to know where she did learn it and Susan goes nearly catatonic:

Susan's flawless skin was no longer the color of peaches and cream, but pale and translucent as skimmed milk.  A single drop of perspiration appeared at her hairline.

Reaching across the table, Martie held one hand in front of her friend's face.

Susan apparently didn't see it. She stared through the hand.

"Who?" Martie gently insisted.

Suddenly, numerous beads of sweat were strung across Susan's brow.  Her hands had been folded on the table, but now they were fiercely clenched, the skin stretched tight and white across the knuckles, the fingernails of her right hand digging hard into the flesh of her left.

Ghost spiders crawled along the back of Martie's neck and crept down the staircase of her spine.

"Who told you Eric was screwing around?"

Still staring at some spectre, Susan tried to speak but could not get a word out.  Her mouth turned soft, trembled, as though she were about to break into tears.

Susan seemed to be silenced by a phantom hand.  The sense of another presence in the room was so powerful that Martie wanted to turn again and look behind her; but no one would be there.

 Martie then snaps her fingers, and Susan completely snaps out of it.  In fact, she doesn't seem to remember the whole conversation and certainly doesn't want to talk about it anymore. She suddenly smiles and seems cheerful and energetic, but determined to stick to innocent topics.

 Clearly this is a classic scene from a mind control novel, a sign that the questioner is Getting Too Close, so the brainwasher has implanted this a a sort of a fuse to short circuit this line of questioning.  The trouble is that it doesn't work so well in this mind control novel, because it never happens again, even there are some excellent opportunities for it to happen.  Nor is any explanation ever given for Ahriman implanting this short circuit mechanism, as opposed to something less suspicious.  I can think of at least three golden opportunities in the novel where this technique could have made another appearance.  To use all three would undoubtedly be overkill.  But Koontz does not even reuse it once.  To work properly, this strange reaction would have to occur at least one other time and be explained.

As evening approaches and Martie prepares to leave, Susan hints that something more terrible and sinister than she has admitted may be happening.  She won't say what, other than that she suspects Eric is coming into the apartment while she is asleep.  This, one suspects, as much as his purported affair, my account for why Susan called him a "selfish pig" and has become so hostile to him.  But she refuses to say what is causing her suspicions.  Martie playfully threatens to read her segments from boring academic tomes by Dusty's father and step-fathers if Susan doesn't tell.  She also drops what proves to be a clue, saying that Dusty's current step-father, Derek Lampton, wrote a psychological book entitled, Dare to Be Your Own Best Friend.  Susan promises to call, and Martie leaves.

 I am actually breaking off about a page before the end of Chapter 17, because the last page of the chapter moves us into a whole different tone than we have been experiencing before.  But before that, we have to learn what Dusty has been up to after leaving New Life Clinic.